The present invention relates generally to printing on articles of manufacture, and more particularly to a manufacturing tray with customized inlays for processing different types of articles of manufacture.
Performance improvements in computing, networking and communications has led to enormous advances in the number and types of capabilities that one can achieve using a networked device. For example, in the printing industry, websites such as www.vistaprint.com allow a user of a networked device to select and customize template designs for printed and electronic products, and then to order and purchase quantities of such product(s). As the ability to customize designs for printed products becomes simpler for the end customer, the demand for customized printed designs on different types of products has increased. For example, consumers desire not only printed paper documents such as business cards, postcards, brochures, posters, etc., but also many other types of items such as shirts, hats and other garments, and office tools and promotional items such as rulers, USB drives, calculators, toys, tape measures, etc.
As the desire for articles of manufacture such as the promotional items and office tools just described increases, companies looking to print on such products seek ways to meet the demand. Typically, printing on an article of manufacture, especially those that do not comprise a paper product, requires a specialized printing platform (hereinafter “printer tray”) designed to fixedly retain the article of manufacture while a particular design is printed thereon. A blank (unprinted) article of manufacture is loaded onto the specialized printer tray, which in turn is loaded onto a conveyance system of the printing system, which prints the intended design on the article of manufacture. In an industrial environment, manufacturers of printed articles of manufacture typically imprint the same design on a long run of the same type of article of manufacture. This is due in part to the fact that mass production has traditionally been the realm of non-customized unpersonalized products, and further in part due to the high setup time for each print run. In general, in the past, higher efficiencies in terms of time and cost were achieved by printing the same design on high quantities of the same type of article of manufacture. The fewer the quantity of a given type of article of manufacture printed with a given design, the less efficient the process was.
Mass customization overturns the traditional model for achieving high efficiencies in printing. For any given type of article of manufacture, there may be as many different unique designs to print as there are quantity of the particular type of article of manufacture. Adding into this mix any number of different types of articles of manufacture, and the traditional model for achieving printing efficiencies is no longer applicable.
What is needed is a new printing model which allows any number of unique print designs to be printed on any number of different types of articles of manufacture without interrupting the manufacturing (i.e., “printing”) flow or causing downtime of the printing system. Furthermore, it would be desirable to allow multiple different types of articles of manufacture to be printed in any order in the manufacturing flow. Additionally, it would be desirable to allow insertion of high-priority print jobs into the manufacturing flow without interrupting the flow or causing any downtime of the printing system.